The Right to Be Unpredictable

Most of the systems we now live inside share an unstated goal: to make us easier to predict. Recommendation engines learn from what we've already watched. Professional platforms reward the cadence that worked last time. Large language models, trained on the archive of what humans have already written, carry the norms of the past into every answer they give. None of this is malicious. It is simply what optimization looks like when the thing being optimized is a person.

In Episode 101 of Modem Futura, Andrew Maynard and I ask a question that sounds abstract until you start noticing it everywhere: is unpredictability a right, a responsibility, or a luxury?

Why we both want and resist predictability

Humans organize. We divide land into countries and time into calendars and people into first and last names, because a society that can anticipate the future can prepare for it. But the things we prize most — creativity, innovation, discovery, the founding of anything new — come from someone seeing what the existing model didn't contain. A fully predictable civilization would be static, and as Andrew puts it, static is another word for dead. Unpredictability isn't noise in the system. It's how the system evolves.

Predictability breeds fragility

Futures thinkers talk about black swans, events no one saw coming that reshape everything in hindsight. One of the arguments in this episode is that over-predicting is how you breed them. The more tightly you control what you expect, the less you can see, and the more exposed you become to whatever you've foreclosed. Minority Report gets invoked here not as prophecy but as a used future: a story about prediction at scale that also shows how brittle such a system becomes the moment an unpredictable human enters the loop.

The playpen problem

Education is where this tension is most visible. Institutions say they want critical thinkers and problem solvers, then assess everyone against the same template. Andrew calls this a playpen, a space defined by what you cannot do. The alternative I've been arguing for over the past decade is a performance of understanding, where learners demonstrate depth in a form they define. Then there's the playground, which has edges too, but inside them imagination is permitted to run.

Constructive unpredictability

Not every deviation is creative, and the episode is careful about that. The distinction we land on is constructive versus destructive unpredictability. The design challenge, for educators, technologists, and anyone building the tools we'll think with, is to create systems that don't just tolerate serendipity but make room for it deliberately.

Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, or watch it on YouTube.

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🎧 Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/46cmohk

🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3BcLR19gSOYvg1F6k8Imuc?si=8QQEKsocSt-K3dOQZzUlxg

📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/JNjtU5uP1e4

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